How we failed, then succeeded, at migrating to TypeScript

Re:How we failed, then succeeded, at migrating to TypeScript by davidjnelson on Sunday October 13, 2019 @03:27PM (#21242360)

Depends on your team size. 5+ engineers and need to refactor things? Typescript will make those needs far easier. Tooling support is amazing, for things like autocomplete, module import insertion and sorting, symbol renaming, function extraction, linting capabilities, correctness of code after changing designs.

There’s some learning around how to type things, but not too hard and very worth it. Need at least one teammate / leader who has used c++/java/c#/etc. extensively on large codebases to mentor others.

Teams of one, es6 is fine, typescript setup is probably overkill, especially for an mvp.

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Re:How we failed, then succeeded, at migrating to TypeScript by eropple on Sunday October 13, 2019 @06:38PM (#21243703)

Dunno about you, but I do all of the things you mentioned, regularly, on a solo project. My test burden is greatly shrunken (getting rid of all those “did I pass sane args?” tests that one needs between modules) and I have much more confidence that I’m not shipping broken stuff.

I don’t think writing TypeScript actually takes longer once you’re practiced and it eliminates entire categories of error. YMMV, of course, but in 2019 it’s hard for me not to think of a new JavaScript project as somewhat unserious.

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Re:How we failed, then succeeded, at migrating to TypeScript by davidjnelson on Sunday October 13, 2019 @07:20PM (#21243963)

I agree, it doesn’t take me personally any longer to write typescript. In fact, it saves me tons of time and endless headaches. I _love_ typescript and use it at work in react and have used it in node for side projects. The benefits are incredible as you mentioned!

I guess it depends on what you’re doing. Setting up the tooling can sometimes be a bit of a pain in combination with other tools which are not designed with typescript in mind from the get go, such as react_on_rails.

If you’re doing a quick mvp in a weekend, I’m still not sure typescript is right. But it really depends on what other tools you are using and how well they integrate. If the mvp works, ya, definitely switch to typescript ASAP. That’s a fine line and really depends on the use case.

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